It seems churlish to object when new money is made available for life-saving medicines.

The doubling of the Scottish Government's new medicines fund will be enormously welcome to the families of people with terminal illnesses. In some cases, new treatments can grant more time to people suffering from rare conditions or at the end of their lives.

It hardly needs to be said that for the families and friends of those who are terminally ill, any hope will be seized on and any additional time with their loved ones appears priceless.

But that is not the truth, and there is a price. The cold reality is that £40m spent in one area inevitably cuts the amount available for other areas.

The cash comes from the Scottish Government's health budget, using a rebate from pharmaceutical companies under the UK wide branded drug pricing scheme.

Could this money have been spent differently? There were certainly other options. It could have been spent on meeting the Scottish Government's A&E waiting time targets, now routinely missed. It could be spent on a host of more routine, less high profile conditions, which nevertheless diminish the quality of life for many thousands of Scots including heart, lung and gut conditions.

It could even have been spent on improving end-of-life care. Good palliative care has been shown to extend life, improve its quality and has virtually no side effects. This week has been dubbed 'dying matters awareness week' and it is timely to consider the way we approach death as well as keeping people alive.

In February, researchers at the University of York looked at the effect of a similar special cancer drugs fund and how it operates in England. They concluded it was poor value and diverted funding away from other treatments. For every healthy year for patients gained by the fund, five could be lost to other patients across the NHS, they claimed. However these patients who would benefit from more routine care were unidentified and invisible, they said.

The Welsh NHS has resisted setting up a similar fund, but has come under pressure to do so over concerns about health inequalities for cancer patients between Wales and the rest of the UK.

In 2013/14, in Scotland, the rare conditions medicines fund - predecessor to the new medicines fund - was £20m. Last October, by which point it had benefited 1000 patients, the sum was doubled. Now it has been doubled again.

However the NHS has to balance demands from across the population and there are unseen costs to such decisions. Priorities should be carefully considered, through debate, not by the arbitrary, headline-grabbing doubling of budgets.

'Cost simply shouldn't be an issue' cancer charities claim about new drugs. But value is plainly a factor too.

Innovation costs, and many people affected by a rare or incurable illness such as cystic fibrosis live in hope that science can come up with a breakthrough. So Without the funding to take advantage of medical advances, such hopes will be frustrated. It is right that such money is made available, but only in tandem with a proper consideration of the many other pressing priorities for the NHS.